


con fuoco

by liraels



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, F/F, I Write to Cope, like they are both professional musicians this is the premise, thesis statement: the cello is the sexiest instrument
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:34:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27589604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liraels/pseuds/liraels
Summary: There was Eve in her mind’s eye – Villanelle couldn’t help but picture it, and wasn’t it a perfect picture? Sitting prim and poised in her blacks, hair down past her shoulders like Villanelle had told her. Smoothing her hand up and down the neck of her cello, head tilted over the strings as she beheld her instrument. How easily she owned it! How natural it was for her to hold the body of it between her knees with that gentle strength, that sensuous balance so Eve felt each note between her thighs and – Villanelle swore she felt it too.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 33
Kudos: 88





	con fuoco

**Author's Note:**

> ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i wish i had something good to say here but basically i just wish somebody would stop me writing AUs. but then this chapter wrote itself so easily and i had a mountain of fun doing it, so i almost have no regrets.
> 
> i think i watched too much queen's gambit and practiced too much of my own (less than amateur) music lately, thinking about how obsessive you need to be to make it big. and how fucking sexy eve polastri playing the cello would be. and so

**prelude**

If Villanelle woke with a hangover on the morning of her double concerto – at the Royal Albert, no less, the most important performance of her career to date – then please be fucking quiet about it. Loud noises made her head ring.

Sweat-damp sheets tugged at her skin as she groaned into consciousness, every bit of her over-sensitive and dulled all at once. She cracked an eye open only to be rewarded with a piercing stab through her sinuses. The only solution was to burrow further into the bed and try to ignore the worst of the pain: the ghost of nails on the back of her neck; and of course her fingers, still aching with Brahms’ running passages.

It took her a while to notice the weight beside her in the bed, and something alien began to pool inside Villanelle’s stomach – dread, because she usually remembered to usher them out before the morning. Or, perhaps, something much worse – something low and warm, because could that possibly be…

Of course not. The weight was her violin, left lying carelessly atop the bedding beside its open case. She could hardly bear to look at it.

Her phone rang, so well-timed, that piercing default shrill. Villanelle grunted through her teeth, flopping across the bed to reach for it and squint at the too-bright screen. Against her better judgement, she answered. Listened to the measured breathing on the other end of the line and waited for one of them to crack.

But the silence – it was too much, her lips still felt fuzzy and swollen, and she really would have liked to go back to sleep.

“What?” Villanelle mumbled.

A staticky clearing of the throat answered first. Then: “Are you still in bed?” asked Eve, with the audacity.

“Some of us had a bigger night than others.” A lie. They each had the same night, of course, with the exception that Villanelle didn’t sleep after it. Instead – she must have practiced some more, drunk some more too. Vodka and Brahms into the wee hours, wasn’t that sad? And she couldn’t be sure which was worse: drinking alone, or playing her part over and over again in an empty hotel room without her co-soloist to fill in the rests.

“You stayed out?”

“Mmm. And in. They set us up in this fancy hotel, may as well make use of it. Great bed, quiet springs.” Not a lie, but definitely misleading. Villanelle insisted on clutching tight to her cruelty, it was all she had left.

Eve said, “You better be in shape for tonight.”

“I will be. Will you?”

“Of course.”

“ _Of course_ ,” parroted Villanelle, licking the words with sarcasm.

There settled another extended pause, accompanied by a rustling and the shadow of a plucked note. Villanelle closed her eyes to find soothing black and saw Eve in her own hotel room down the hall, or perhaps she was already in one of the practice rooms at the concert hall. Wherever she was, she most definitely had her bow in hand.

It may have been the case that Eve only knew Villanelle existed for, God, a month, or was it two, before today? Because Eve was self-centred like that and didn’t track all the twenty-something virtuosos. But, nevertheless, there was something. There was _something_ and it hung heavy on the phone line like wet laundry.

“Eve,” Villanelle said, trying to fit her cotton-wool mouth around the name. “Why did you call?”

In the silence, there was Eve in her mind’s eye – Villanelle couldn’t help but picture it, and wasn’t it a perfect picture? Sitting prim and poised in her blacks, hair down past her shoulders like Villanelle had told her. Smoothing her hand up and down the neck of her cello, head tilted over the strings as she beheld her instrument. How easily she owned it! How natural it was for her to hold the body of it between her knees with that gentle strength, that sensuous balance so Eve felt each note between her thighs and – Villanelle swore she felt it too.

But Eve snapped, “Get your act together,” and then hit her with the low pulse of the dial tone. Villanelle bared her teeth at it, that untuned note thudding through her tender head, and she thought, oh, she hoped she wouldn’t get her act together.

She hoped they might crash and burn.

**I allegro moderato**

When she first heard the woman play, Villanelle had one foot in juvenile detention, the other foot between the gutter and her mouth. This made balance difficult, as you would imagine, though if she fell on her face it was definitely the ground’s fault.

And, boy, did the ground have a lot to answer for.

This is what happened in a Moscow orphanage, no beating around it: you made friends, tried hard, fit in, and got very little to show for it. Villanelle never did any of those things, of course, and she was as empty of the rest of them. At least she never wasted her energy.

But you take them as you find them, and on this particular summer’s night that was exactly how Villanelle could be found. A blank slate, she liked to think, but one with hidden teeth. No real job, little formal education, one count of grievous bodily harm under her belt and – worst of all, maybe – fourteen years old. She could’ve sworn there was no right side of the bed.

Moscow was odd in the summer; the city wore heat like an over-sized coat, so the sun slumped over the sides of the taller buildings and fell loose and baggy in cool shadows. It wasn’t warm tonight, Villanelle noticed, the encroaching evening wore the day’s heat away like it always did. But it was fine enough to be out on the streets in time for the Saturday shows to begin, and so it was fine enough for her purposes.

It was _a night for music_ , she heard a man say to his wife as they strode past. Perhaps it was, Villanelle would hardly know. She knew the national anthem. She knew the rhymes from her childhood and the folk songs Anna would hum as she tottered around in the kitchen.

But she wasn’t here for the music. Her venture tonight had a more nefarious purpose, but what of that?

She tucked herself neatly inside the crowd funnelling into Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, not daring to tug at the fraying sleeves of her thrifted jumper. And once the crowd had delivered her, maybe she darted around the foyer, craning her neck to spy her prize – and what of that, too?

Villanelle loitered in the foyer while the ticketholders took their drinks and their seats, one by one. It had to be dark, first – she didn’t have a ticket. But she’d checked the box office earlier in the afternoon and there were plenty of empty seats, because this was classical music and an American performer, at that. Importantly, there should be an empty seat right next to Anna.

Anna. Her nefarious purpose, of course. What else.

Villanelle watched through the doors to the hall until a hush came upon the audience, in tandem with the dimming of the lights. Showtime, as they say. She slipped inside, unseen by the ushers, and slinked low to crouch behind the final row of seats which stood vacant. Four long notes rang out from the direction of the stage – now that didn’t sound like a song at all – but Villanelle ignored them, instead chancing a glance over the audience to find Anna’s silhouette against the wash lights.

The quiet deepened suddenly, like the floor had fallen beneath it. 

There was Anna. Villanelle needed only creep her way forward, row by row, and then she could slip into the empty seat beside Anna and save her from this awful night with only that dull husband and some American cellist to keep her company.

And Villanelle could never quite explain why she looked at the stage, then, never after. But she did, in a fleeting, flexing glance, and then a double take with whip-focus.

It was the hair, that must have been it. Dark curls snagging on her attention like muscle memory. It had to have been the hair, otherwise it would have been something intangible. Something Villanelle could not explain to herself, and thus could not stand for. She decided the hair was the thing.

Maybe that was true, but nevertheless –

It was a foregone conclusion before horsehair kissed steel.

Villanelle never learned the cellist’s name. She spent the remainder of the night crouched there, invisible in the shadows at the back of the hall, enraptured. So she didn’t pick up a program, and could hardly ask Anna about it later. Besides, putting a name to the woman would have ruined the illusion.

The way she moved, it was like –

Well, that was the important thing. Movement. The dip and the struggle, the clench and the give of it, of this woman and her music. Her sound like a hello. Not welcoming, exactly, but a prick at Villanelle’s attention, a head above water.

Villanelle developed her first hypothesis: sound was movement, and so was Villanelle, and thus she would find that woman with the cello, sometime, somewhere – inside herself or in the flesh. Villanelle would play like her and one day, when she was good enough, she would play _with_ her too.

And then she decided it was not a hypothesis at all; it was just a fact not yet proven wrong.

She did try the cello, of course. Admiration births imitation first, inspiration second, ill-matched twins.

Was it Villanelle’s fault if it didn’t agree with her?

It was Anna who introduced them – Villanelle and the cello – prior to their disagreement. Anna delighted in Villanelle’s sudden interest in music, it was something they could share, apparently, other than languages. The cello belonged to a friend who taught privately and agreed to give Villanelle one thirty-minute lesson in exchange for tea and cake.

Villanelle thought she would love it, and when she took the instrument in her hands she was thinking of that woman, of course, the woman she first saw play.

She liked the way it fit between her legs, forcing her knees apart like the way a man would sit. And the height of it, tugging her spine straight and her shoulders into delicate poise. The half-size cello was too small, of course, but there was something about that – she had to crane over it just a little, curving her limbs like spiders’ legs. She liked that; it felt like she owned it, this body of sound.

And Anna’s friend, the teacher – a man – tutted and tittered over her posture, her possessive hunch, and used his big hands to adjust her fingers on the bow. Through this indecency, all the while, Villanelle sat and waited with horsehair balanced against the strings.

Then, he said, “You are too tall. I don’t have any three-quarter sizes – I will give you mine. A little big, but you will be careful with it? Just to try.”

Villanelle nodded – she was a quiet child, at least then – and took the larger instrument in her hands. It wasn’t too big; it was just the right size, the teacher told her, it was perfect for her.

And she hated it. How could anyone own this, something of this strength, this weight? It seemed to tower over her head as she sat. This cello was full-bodied and wider than her at the waist. Her limbs stretched taut and stiff to reach the strings. There was no space in which to corner it, no way to overpower it.

The teacher nodded. “Play,” he said.

Villanelle thought of the woman, and she did.

She drew the bow down across the thickest string first – the C, the man had told her – because those were the sounds she remembered most from the woman’s performance. The bottom-heavy groans that she’d pulled from the instrument, sinking to the floor and tugging on Villanelle’s sternum like gravity.

The bow skidded across the bridge, and Villanelle’s grip slid from that precise arrangement of fingers into a brutal fist. The cello groaned, but not the way the woman’s cello had groaned – spiritual, ineffable, like an earthquake through water. No, the cello groaned in pain and in protest, and Villanelle pressed her knees around it, harder as she pushed the bow again, pulled, pushed, harder and harder as she chased the sound but it would not listen and she could not make it listen as much as she tried –

“Stop, stop.”

She stopped, breathing hard.

The teacher arranged her grip again and tilted the bow to another string, the thinnest one. “You remember this one? An A. Don’t press so hard, okay? Listen to the tone.”

Villanelle stared down at her bow on the string for a moment, that careful balance like a pair of scales. She _would_ own it. This animal of wood and polish and strung steel – she would bend it to her will.

She played again.

The note rang, stop-start but with the merest glimpse of those high, grasping sounds Villanelle recalled the woman coaxing from her own cello. Keen, mirrored like blades. Villanelle took another bow and it all fell apart.

The thing scratched, shook like radio static and pierced her ears instead of her heart, as it should have.

She almost tossed the instrument down, then and there, almost smashed it for its insolence, for its naked defiance. All before this kind man’s patience. But the teacher must have seen something of this in her face, because he took the neck of the cello and lifted it from her quite suddenly.

“You don’t like it?” he asked.

Villanelle stared at her knees, still lolling apart where she had held the cello. The bow she dropped uselessly by her feet.

“You might try the violin. You have a good – “ he tapped the bottom of his chin with his knuckles – “a good neck for it. And thin fingers.”

But the teacher did not have a violin, and Anna did not know anybody who did.

Except one day, not too long after, there was a man. As there so often is, in the most unworthy of places at the most inconvenient of times, but on this occasion the man was a blessing. Or, he held the blessing, conveying it like a message locked in that small leather-bound case gripped in his stubby fingers.

The man would stop on the sidewalk in one of the most-trafficked and empty-pocketed neighbourhoods, on the same street that took Villanelle from Anna’s flat to the orphanage two afternoons a week. It was here that the man retrieved the blessing from its case, somehow fitting it snugly beneath his beard and against his thick neck, and he would play.

He was not like the woman in the concert hall. And his fiddle was nothing like the monster-cello. He was large and broad, and greying, and though he held the instrument aloft it seemed to sway to the will of his movements.

The first time she saw him, Villanelle stopped dead on the pavement and the peak hour crowd swerved impatiently around her. She ignored them, focused as she was on the trill and the saw of the fiddler’s tune.

Song after song, she stood stock-still and listened. The sun metered out behind the city buildings, but nobody was expecting her at home. The fiddler cast looks at her as he played, sizing her up and then, it seemed, waiting for signs of her approval. Which she gave, clapping politely after each piece. But really she just wanted to listen, and she didn’t want him to stop.

A particularly raucous folk tune ended with a quick flurry of notes, climbing high on the fingerboard and shrill in Villanelle’s ears, then the fiddler froze as he waited for the sound to fade out. Villanelle didn’t clap this time, because he put his violin down and levelled her with a grey-eyed stare.

“Are you going to keep gaping,” the fiddler asked, gruff but not unkind, “or are you going to pay for my time?” He nodded pointedly at the case lying open at his feet, the velvet lining unadorned but for a few lonely coins.

“I don’t have any money,” said Villanelle.

“Of course you don’t. You have to clap, then.”

She clapped. He grunted, packing his instrument carefully away. That was the first time.

There were other times – many of them, for the fiddler was there in that same spot every afternoon. And Villanelle started to walk by even on the days she wasn’t at Anna’s. Each time she would stand and watch, studying the fiddler’s movements, the way the violin squatted in his hands and waited for his fierce instructions. It never misbehaved or spoke out of turn. He was stronger than it, and the instrument seemed to know this. It did as he willed it.

Villanelle still thought about the woman – the American cellist – but now not merely in the interest of aspiration, but by way of contrast. The cellist was a warped mirror, obsession in opposite reflection. Villanelle rewound and replayed that night in her mind’s eye: the way the woman moved, how she dove into the music like she never expected to come up for air.

It seemed now, to Villanelle, she barely had enough breaths to survive on anyway. She’d rather grasp it, first, than let herself be taken away.

One afternoon – the one Villanelle must have been waiting for, though she didn’t realise it until later – the fiddler paused after a rather mournful song and crouched to sift through his earnings. There wasn’t much, there never was, and Villanelle had nothing to add to it.

As he straightened up, he looked at her, the skinny girl standing an arm’s length away with her spine pressed against the wall. He looked at her very, very hard. And then he weighed the fiddle in his hands and he gave it to her, right there on the side of the street, passers-by dealing glances at the two of them as they hurried by.

Villanelle’s fingers curled automatically, comfortably around the violin’s neck, an easier grip than she’d managed with that stubborn cello. This instrument was not hers, of course, but the way it felt, trapped there between her left hand and the tuck of her chin – it was almost like she owned it already.

She took the bow from the fiddler, who frowned and went to adjust the placement of her fingers at the frog. Until he stopped, frowning harder.

“Have you played before?” he asked, studying the spider of her bowhand.

“No,” said Villanelle. She’d read books, though, studied the diagrams in the meantime. She’d watched the fiddler like a hawk. All so she could have some hope at _this_.

There was something about this lithe little instrument, she thought. Something that might allow itself to get trodden down beneath her stomping feet, but make beautiful music as it did.

When she first drew the bow across the highest of the strings, it cut to the bone.

Not Villanelle, though, the sound didn’t touch her. But it cut through the fiddler, and through the half-dozen pedestrians walking by; it sliced through the air and through the foggy street with a purpose and a clarity befitting a much more practiced player.

Villanelle, of course, had no real practice at all.

The next note she played – an upbow on the mellower D-string – was more of what would be expected from someone of her inexperience. It grated and ground, ugly, messy in the aftermath of that one pure note. And now she experimented with her left hand, pressing down on the strings in random places – so the third, the fourth, the fifth bowings all whined out-of-tune and sucked the last reverberations of that perfect note from the air.

But the first note was enough. The fiddler nodded, scratched at his beard, and smiled with lots of teeth. Villanelle grinned back. This was right.

She played the violin; it did not play her.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a very 'when the whim takes me' kind of fic, unlike my ongoing multichapter, so no guarantees for anything. turned out i was very much in the mood for it today and who knows i may be in that mood tomorrow as well
> 
> (i have exams next week. can you tell?)
> 
> anyway catch me on the twit @ lliraels


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